Kevin's Watch

The Lord of the Rings would be an honorable contender. I read it long after TCTC; just last year, in fact. I had already been spoiled by Peter Jackson's films, and by a Tolkien encyclopedia that had taken me deep into the world of Middle-earth. Oddly, LOTR itself took me the longest to get into. But once I finally did, it swept me away.

Still, while the LOTR saga moved me in its way, it did not shake up my world the way TCTC seized me, tore me to shreds, ground me up, then put me back together again. No other fantasy work has ever put me through that kind of emotional crucible. No other fantasy work has ever given me a more epic vision while at the same time affecting me at the most intensely personal level.

No other auther or character touched me like TC i dont like and cant read SRD other works and i read a lot. the MAGITION AND SILVERTHORN BY RAY FIEST did make me thinkT

Really enjoyed the MAGICIAN, a book I could'nt put down.
It infuriated me that FEIST would'nt stay put, like TCTC. It was like reading a collection of great story ideas.

The publishers should have put on the front cover - 'Comparible to Donaldson at his best.'

Lord Foul wrote:you must've felt some overwhelming sense of discovery or joy or excitement at this new world. Has any other fantasy series or fantasy book done it for you?

Nothing before or since - and I am going back thirty plus years. No other fantasy, no other novel, no other book. It's 'TCTC first, the rest nowhere' for me. Sad to say but I have given up waiting.
There is a moment of high pathos in 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' chapter of The Wind in the Willows where the demi-God Pan tells the mole that he must expunge all memory of thier meeting 'lest it should blight his life left to come', such was the peace and traquility experienced by the Mole in His presence. There is a part of me that wishes I could read the Chronicles anew each day, so rare are such heights of aesthetic experience.

High Lord Tolkien wrote:Of course if it turns out like I hope that the Land is a dream

There is a bit of me that thinks maybe this is where it is going. PS.The Wind in the Willows is soooo beautiful and the Chapter at the end of Winnie the pooh where Christopher Robin has to explain to Pooh et al that he is growing up and won't be coming to play with them any more is the saddest peice of writing I have ever encountered. I mean it! (pps I'm 52 years old - how sad am I?)

matrixman wrote:The Lord of the Rings would be an honorable contender. I read it long after TCTC; just last year, in fact. I had already been spoiled by Peter Jackson's films, and by a Tolkien encyclopedia that had taken me deep into the world of Middle-earth. Oddly, LOTR itself took me the longest to get into. But once I finally did, it swept me away.

Still, while the LOTR saga moved me in its way, it did not shake up my world the way TCTC seized me, tore me to shreds, ground me up, then put me back together again. No other fantasy work has ever put me through that kind of emotional crucible. No other fantasy work has ever given me a more epic vision while at the same time affecting me at the most intensely personal level.

Damn good post, MM.

Only TC

Only the Chronicles.

Yeah, I'm with MM. I read LOTR first, actually, that that moved me quite a bit. Then I read Covenant, and have never been able to find something to top it since.

While I think LOTR and the Gap series are better crafted stories, I don't think anything I have read in the world of fantasy/sci-fi has packed as much of an emotional punch as the Covenant books have. And if I chop down the boundaries of genre fiction, I can't think of anything else either that has had as strong of emotional impact on me either.

And to prove so, my personal emotional response to seeing "The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" on a book a few years ago at Borders was very telling of how much they have meant to me. I've never trembled and nearly wept seeing the cover of a book before. It's a pity that so far it hasn't lived up to those reactions yet, but I still have hope.

LF,

I'll try Elantris next. Thanks for the recommendation.

I read LOTR long before TC, and I would say I was a big LOTR fan once I had read it. But while LOTR entertained me immensely, and fascinated me, and inspired my imagination, and even shaped my life in small ways ... it did not move me. Not like the Chronicles. LOTR was just a lot of fun. The Chronicles were, like MM speaks about, emotionally engaging like nothing I had ever read.

I read the Lord of the Rings when I was in 6th grade, and I read the hobbit in 7th and again in 12th grade. I recently reread the Lord of the Rings just over the winter break this year, in preparation for my Tolkien Studies course in college.

Yes, that's a real class.

Anyhow, I read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant in 10th grade, again in 11th, and just again last summer, except I went from book 1 to 8 in 15 weeks. I loved it every time.

Only a few books have fairly changed my life, or my perspective. Siddhartha changed one. The Bible the other. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, however, changed both, which is why I'm devoted to studying them.

No, nothing else I've ever read impacted me like TCoTC. A fair amount of other stuff was a lot of fun to read ("The Stand" by King, "Dragonriders of Pern"; etc etc), but nothing else ever came close to the depth of story & character development, or the impact of the story itself. High Lord Donaldson rules the Land of Literature !

Nausicaä and His Dark Materials.

The only other fantasy works I can think of that had as big an impact were the Arbai novels of Sheri S. Tepper, in particular "Grass" and "Raising the Stones." I was very young at the time - I can't vouch for the brilliance of the writing style or anything like that - but I remember they were very atmospheric and dark, and rife with anti-heros and "adult themes", and I loved them to bits.

They also created wholly new, and bizarre, but believable alien worlds. I find a lot of fantasy worlds unconvincing, because they are either too wholly nice, or too wholly nasty.

"Grass" in particular was a picture of a real planet, an ecosystem, with all it's fascinating natives and predators and all-pervasive plants.

I hear her work is now considered a bit controversial (radical feminist or something, and with a very early tinge of Islamophobia peaking in due to the portrayal of one particular alien race) but I never saw it that way - and I was a teenage boy, who would've liked controversy if i thought it was there to be found.

For other books that have touched me and made my mind's eye see things as vividly as The Chrons did, you would have to leave the fantasy genre behind.

I consider The Chrons to be literature - worthy of taking their place alongside stuff like Moby Dick, Othello, and Martin Amis' "Money". All of those books "wield symbols powerfully," as SRD does.

danlo wrote:I threw my copy of LFB into the ditch just before I was picked up by the police as homeless in 1979 and then given over to the good graces of the Rescue Mission in Trenton. I immediately joined the Navy as the quickest way, sans hitchhiking, to make it back to New Mexico. Yes I had already had my period of calling SRD live on the phone at 3AM New Mexico time and wanting to cut off two of my fingers to play TC in the movie. Oddly enough I was too busy surviving and enjoying the beauty of this state to remember that SRD lived here. Then I got on the comp and Sky forced me to reread the Chrons at a very intense moment of my life and that re-energized me to the point of saving my life, and (then) getting up the courage to invite SRD to the first Elohimfest- it all still blows me away to this day..........

Aside from Enemy of the State (and, maybe, Sartre's The Wall) I know that TCTC is THE best anti-hero, anti-social rant ever preformed.

I was at my first A.A. meeting earlier this week, and this sounds like a lot of the stories we told and heard there, except with The Chrons and SRD replaced with the "moment of clarity" and "god, whatever you understand him to be" - and with the Elohimfest replaced with the AA itself.

Not assuming you're an alcoholic or anything (I am, and still drinking, sadly) just that it sounds like a similar style of life, and a similar process of realisation and return to real life.

Under no circumstances should you ever cut your fingers off to get a part in a movie, though. That'd just be wrong.

And for a POV anti-hero rant I would like to re-mention "Money" by Martin Amis. You will hate the main character - and you will love and pity the main character, if you can get to the end. It's an incredible book. Very wordy even compared to The Chrons, though.

some have come close or touched a different part but nothing has affected me like TCTC.
heres a few that come close

Anne McCaffrey and the PERN collection.
mainly Dragon quest,Dragon flight, the White dragon and the Masterharper of PERN, and harperhall books from the series. Dragons dawn too since its the beginning.ahhh..ok..lets just say there is not one book of the 24+ books in that series i did not like.

Stephen King: the Dark Tower series.

PLEASE dont let the chronicles give me the same HORRIBLE feeling i had at the end of the Dark Tower.

I think that there is a danger here, considering the story is not yet finished. I hate to even entertain the thought, but there's a chance the ending of the story will not be what we would expect.. And I know we all expect different things.

Like the Chronicles of Narnia. I t was a good read, but until I read the ending 'The Last Battle', it was just good. The ending absolutely changed the whole series to FANTASTIC, and partly to to with how the revelations touched me and changed my perspectives.

But no, nothing has moved me as much, as deeply, or is an many different ways as the Chronicles of TC. Frank Herbert's 'Dune' - the first 3 books is around abouts, and same with Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle (though as with Narnia didn't get a FANTASTIC rating til 'The Other Wind'), though Earthsea was more profound on a spiritual level, and not as deeply or personal as TC.

The Children of Húrin. What a wonderfully dark, immense movie that would make.

LOTR, of course, and all works related to Middle-Earth.

Mordant's Need.

* Sigh. * I am TC. And therefore no work will ever touch or affect me like the first Chrons.

I loves the second and doing ok on the third, but the fitst are my favorites.